


Personal Effects

by Trivena_Butterfly



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Torchwood
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Dark, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, No canon characters appear directly, One Actor Two Roles, POV Original Character, Post-Series 03: Children of Earth (Torchwood)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:28:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28314561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trivena_Butterfly/pseuds/Trivena_Butterfly
Summary: When the Earth needs saving, the Doctor always comes to the rescue. Except when he can't.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 8





	Personal Effects

The lawyer stood alone in the empty house. The men from the government had finished hours ago, removing everything that could remotely be described as “work-related”, as well as both computers and every storage medium they could find, including the deceaseds’ mobile phones, all four of them. His late client’s (the husband, that is; the wife was innocent of all blame) job almost certainly had something to do with it; he had been a civil servant, one of the nameless, faceless people who keep the government running behind the facade of politics. Practically a nobody; experienced enough to be trusted to handle a crisis, but junior enough, _unimportant_ enough, to be given the jobs that the higher-ups didn’t want to sully their careers with.

He’d apparently been charged with managing the... disaster... with the children. From what the lawyer had heard, that alone would have been a death sentence for his client’s career.

He’d heard on the grapevine that the police had been pressured to close this case quickly and quietly, as a simple murder-suicide brought on by stress and mental illness. They had retaliated by carefully and deliberately taking their time in clearing the crime scene, then refusing to return the handgun; government property or not, it was still evidence and a murder weapon, and when the police wanted to be obstructive by the book they only needed the barest of excuses. 

The removalists had just taken away the last cabinet, to be auctioned along with the rest of the furniture later in the week. There was nobody to inherit; the two daughters had been the couple's only family. A tragedy, really; they, more than any other child involved (and there were none who hadn’t been) were the true victims in all of this. All the others, at least, had had a chance, however slight, but these two had been doomed by the happenstance of their father’s job; “the sins of the father”, indeed.

As they left for the last time, one of the removal men had handed him two objects they had found in the master bedroom, hidden under the mattress. He looked them over now; one seemed to be a diary or sketchbook, filled with the frustrated scribbles of a man with little artistic ability, trying and failing to draw something precious to him. Face after face filled the pages, and, although drawn without skill, every one of them was different; men both young and old, women and children, and some who seemed to be neither, surrounded by schematically-drawn circles within circles, precise and purposeful.

The other was an ornately engraved pocket watch.


End file.
